LISTEN

from The Moon's Jaw

from Holy Land

Rauan Klassnik was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and then spent most of his life in Dallas, TX. After living in Mexico for several years he now resides in Kirkland, WA with his wife Edith and their two dogs. Rauan likes to tweet and blogs for HTMLGIANT, where among other things he runs an advice column.

Praise

It’s full of knives and silk and peacocks and breast milk and ghosts and fetuses and orchards and wounds and girls and suns. It shifts continually between horny and cruel tones, meditative and exacting tones, stiff and puffy images, swallowed up somewhere in the space between all bodies, where nature mutates and crushes you and grinds against itself forever. There’s a constant succession of murder and regrowth, as if no matter how many times you undo a person they’re still here wandering around half-erased. It feels terse and epic at the same time, like the old surrealists, but suited for our age of insane kids. It’s like a Jacuzzi full of semen. A sky-blue hacksaw.

—VICE magazine

In the wound of a stabbed cosmos, Rauan Klassnik’s moon, kin to Plath’s moon bald and wild, bucks against despair. Anytime we devour the queen, we will be forced to vomit her back up, a clean saint out of our foaming mouths. A pretty swell in the music. We’re not afraid of the cinema, even though it houses all our night-mares. We’re not afraid to die. Marble, Tequila, Rotted, Flapping. The myth of biological sex, the myth of biological stability [l]ike cathedral meat. Wrapped in a thin red towel.

—Danielle Pafunda

In both its tender and horrifying moments, Holy Land aptly maps how we are chained to time, place, ourselves, and one another by a million minor assaults--only some of which are physical. As a wide-ranging, metaphoric look at death, power, gendered bodies, sublimity, despair, and anguish, Holy Land succeeds even as it terrifies and, yes, turns the stomach. A remarkable achievement, and one which deserves to be (and must be) read in its entirety.